WORLD’S OLDEST WOMAN.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 1094, 16 January 1912, Page 4

WORLD’S OLDEST WOMAN.

Frau Dutkiewicz, residing at Posen, has celebrated her 125th birthday. So far as official records go, she is the oldest woman in the world. She is tall and thin bur, bent and very feeble, although not absolutely bedridden.

Her face is lull of wrinkles of twelve and a half decades. She is almost blind and deaf, and suffers rheumatic pains. Bong tresses of perfectly white hair give her a patriarchal appearance. She is a pensioner on the bounty of the local Roman Catholics. Her sou, aged eighty-nine, was priest of the Jesus Church in Ponsen. By a strange coincidence, while celebrating Mass before the altar on his mother’s 125th birtnday, he fell dead from heart disease.

Frau Dutkiewiez was married over ninety years ago, and nas been la widow tor fifty-five years. She gave birth to ten children, and her descendants now number more than 200. She possesses two great-great-great grandchildren. She distinctly remembers the Napoleonic wars and the final fall of Napoleon. Those far-off events at the beginning of the nineteenth century are clearly impressed on her memory, whereas many incidents of the last quarter of a century have been entirely forgotten.